Hi everyone.
I have this bottle of Prosecco in the fridge that has been there since May I think, and it was interesting that I pulled it out to read the label and had a feeling of, I suppose - sadness or nostalgia about it, then put it back. I remembered that there was always a feeling before I drank, like a trigger. A thought of “oh fck it!” and it would usually correlate to some feeling of anger, some reaction about my lack of control in a situation. For example, when DH would come home late from work, which meant that I was effectively stuck indoors, looking after the kids - my freedom from doing something on a whim taken away. I’d feel anger (and I also realised that there was a deep issue about my dad’s behaviour in this too) and I’d think “fck it!” have a drink and that woozy feeling would rub it away.
What I am trying to say, is that it is really hard to just stop drinking without looking at the negative feelings - the anger, the guilt, the shame, the fear, the frustration, which drive it. It’s not just a nice drink, or a bottle of feeling good, it is a deliberate erasure, a deliberate disconnect.
It is so much easier- in fact for me it was a doddle- to stop drinking, if you remove the things from your life which get on your nerves. It might mean rearranging your furniture to suit you, setting better boundaries with your partner, dropping that passive-aggressive friend, unsubscribing from all your needy mailing lists, accepting that your family are never going to change so you’ll only do x,y,z, etc, etc. Once all that aversive crap is gone from your life, the need to disconnect from your life disappears.
If you have really deep-seated issues to do with unresolved trauma, I imagine it would probably be a good idea to have therapy though.
But I think you can work wonders by making many small but significant changes in the other areas of your life.
I hope you all have a great week.